For Christmas I received a fascinating present from a friend - my very own "best-selling" book.

"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (great title) bears my name and my image on its cover, and it has glowing reviews.

Yet it was completely composed by AI, with a couple of basic triggers about me supplied by my friend Janet.

It's an intriguing read, and extremely amusing in parts. But it likewise meanders rather a lot, and is somewhere in between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It mimics my chatty style of composing, however it's also a bit repetitive, and really verbose. It may have gone beyond Janet's triggers in collecting data about me.

Several sentences start "as a leading technology reporter ..." - cringe - which could have been scraped from an online bio.

There's likewise a strange, repetitive hallucination in the kind of my feline (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on nearly every page - some more random than others.

There are lots of companies online offering AI-book writing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I contacted the president Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had sold around 150,000 personalised books, generally in the US, considering that rotating from compiling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller expenses ₤ 26. The firm utilizes its own AI tools to produce them, based upon an open source large language design.

I'm not asking you to purchase my book. Actually you can't - only Janet, who developed it, can buy any more copies.

There is presently no barrier to anybody creating one in anyone's name, including celebs - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book includes a printed disclaimer specifying that it is fictional, produced by AI, and created "exclusively to bring humour and delight".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the firm, but Mr Mashiach stresses that the item is meant as a "personalised gag present", and the books do not get sold further.

He intends to widen his range, generating various genres such as sci-fi, and perhaps using an autobiography service. It's developed to be a light-hearted kind of consumer AI - selling AI-generated goods to human customers.

It's also a bit terrifying if, like me, you write for a living. Not least because it most likely took less than a minute to generate, asteroidsathome.net and it does, definitely in some parts, chessdatabase.science sound much like me.

Musicians, authors, artists and actors worldwide have expressed alarm about their work being utilized to train generative AI tools that then produce comparable content based upon it.

"We must be clear, when we are discussing information here, we in fact imply human developers' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to respect creators' rights.

"This is books, this is posts, this is photos. It's works of art. It's records ... The whole point of AI training is to learn how to do something and after that do more like that."

In 2023 a song including AI-generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media before being pulled from streaming platforms because it was not their work and they had not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's developer trying to choose it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were fake, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not think using generative AI for creative purposes should be prohibited, however I do believe that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without consent ought to be banned," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be very effective but let's build it ethically and relatively."

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In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have chosen to block AI designers from trawling their online content for . Others have actually chosen to collaborate - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for instance.

The UK federal government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would enable AI developers to use developers' material on the internet to assist establish their models, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

He mentions that AI can make advances in locations like defence, health care and logistics without trawling the work of authors, journalists and artists.

"All of these things work without going and altering copyright law and messing up the incomes of the country's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, is likewise highly against getting rid of copyright law for AI.

"Creative markets are wealth developers, 2.4 million tasks and a great deal of pleasure," states the Baroness, who is also an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is weakening among its finest performing industries on the vague pledge of development."

A government representative said: "No move will be made until we are absolutely positive we have a useful plan that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for best holders to assist them certify their material, access to top quality product to train leading AI models in the UK, and more openness for ideal holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's brand-new AI strategy, a national information library consisting of public data from a large range of sources will likewise be provided to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal rules to manage AI is now up in the air following President Trump's go back to the presidency.

In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that aimed to improve the security of AI with, among other things, companies in the sector required to share details of the workings of their systems with the US federal government before they are released.

But this has actually now been reversed by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do instead, but he is stated to desire the AI sector to face less policy.

This comes as a variety of claims against AI firms, and particularly versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been secured by everybody from the New York Times to authors, kenpoguy.com music labels, and even a comedian.

They claim that the AI firms broke the law when they took their content from the web without their approval, and used it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "fair usage" and are therefore exempt. There are a variety of factors which can constitute reasonable use - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing examination over how it gathers training information and whether it should be paying for it.

If this wasn't all enough to ponder, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the past week. It ended up being the many downloaded free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek declares that it established its innovation for a portion of the rate of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's current supremacy of the sector.

As for me and a profession as an author, I think that at the minute, if I truly want a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weak point in generative AI tools for larger tasks. It is full of errors and hallucinations, and it can be quite tough to read in parts because it's so long-winded.

But offered how rapidly the tech is developing, I'm not sure for how long I can remain positive that my significantly slower human writing and editing abilities, are better.

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